i'm in the highway patrol region 3 and i have my frequencies put in and talk group ids. my question is why does it stop on an id channel and i hear no audio on it? it does this more often then when i do hear them talking.

List your location (southern Pickens Co? maybe), and the frequencies and talkgropus you're listening to. Also the radio you're using. It might be that you're not using the proper rebanding bandplan tables on your trunked system.

You got way to many freqs and several Talk Groups listed that are not in your area. You need 853.6000 only. After you get this to work you could add the two controllers for tower 50. Just enter Anderson and Greenville SCHP. If this works then add the Greenville tower for some of the other groups. Not all groups are on all towers.

Tower 50 is the Seneca site on Oconee. Frequencies are 853.9625 (primary) and 853.1000 (alternate).

On the Palmetto 800 database page, you'll see on the System Frequencies table that each site is numbered. All active frequencies for each site are listed in that table, with primary control channels marked in Red and alternate control channels marked in blue.

You PRO-197 only needs the control channels for the site (or sites) you want to listen to programmed. Since you're closest to the Pickens Site #24, Larry recommended you delete all channels except the control channel for that site, 853.6000. Doing this essentially assures that you'll be able to monitor the site closest to you without having to wonder if you're monitoring "the best" site.

Once you confirm that you're tracking properly on the Pickens site, you can add control channels for nearby sites and see what else you might hear. Not all sites carry the same talkgroups. So Site 50 Seneca, Site 42 Anderson, Site 35 Greenville and Site 31 Caesars Head are all possibilities. Which sites you'll hear is dependent on your location and the antenna you're using. Monitoring these other sites might allow you to listen to other agencies not carried on the Pickens Site, like Greenville City PD, or Laurens Co SD, or something like that.

If you're ONLY interested in listening to SCHP Troop 3, monitoring only the Pickens site will work just fine. You many not hear Ch. 38 Spartanburg all the time, but you'll hear pretty much everything else.

It might be that you're not using the proper rebanding bandplan tables on your trunked system.

When a site is rebanded, not only do the actual frequencies change (866-868MHz down to 851-853MHz) but the way the frequencies are represented in the trunked control data stram also change.

On a Motorola system, a channel grant is issued when a radio keys up, and the controller tells all radios affiliated to that talkgroup to jump to a particular frequency to receive the transmission. That channel grant message doesn't include a specific frequency, it use a channel number that represents a frequency. The "bandplan tables" are the formulas that the radio uses to translates the channel number in the channel grant to a specific frequency. This is what allows trunk-tracking scanners to work without programming all the voice frequencies.

Rebanded created a need for a new set of bandplan tables. You must set this correctly - if not, your radio will tune to the wrong frequency to receive a transmission. This will result in sometimes seeing a talkgroup displayed but not hearing audio.

In Win500, on the TSYS objects tab, highlight your Palmetto 800 TSYS object and press the Trunking Tables button. Select "Rebanded" in the "Standard Band Plans" dropdown box. That will set the bandplan tables correctly for rebanded sites.

In Win500, on the TSYS objects tab, highlight your Palmetto 800 TSYS object and press the Trunking Tables button. Select "Rebanded" in the "Standard Band Plans" dropdown box. That will set the bandplan tables correctly for rebanded sites.

You should perform this step for any Motorola system that has undergone rebanding. This certainly applies to the Palmetto 800 system TSYS object you programmed (referred to above), which is the name of the statewide trunked radio system that SCHP and many other agencies use.

It does not apply to P25 systems like the Palmetto P25 system that Anderson Co uses.

If you list the other TSYS objects you have programmed, I can advise on those.

Hmmm, so I see a separate TSYS object for Hwy Patrol, Grvl Co, Grvl City, Palmetto 800, "Surveillance", Statewide Hwy Patrol, and several called "......."

I have no idea what might be included in those labeled "Surveillance" or "........." - additional information would be helpful (by PM or email if you prefer).

SCHP, Greenville Co, Greenville City, Palmetto 800 and Statewide Highway Patrol are certainly all the same trunked radio system (called Palmetto 800), but perhaps with different sites, or maybe some of the same sites, included in each. You have several options on consolidating these if you choose and it will likely improve the apparent scan speed of your configuration. But in general, if you use multiple TSYS objects for Palmetto 800, you'll want to group them and name them based on location/region rather than function.

You could -
- create a separate TSYS object for each site, ie each object would contain only the control channels for a single site. Set the AlphaTag to the name of the site so you know which you are listening to.
- create a single TSYS object with ALL sites you want to monitor. You'd add the control channels for all those sites, with a limit of 32 frequencies. Set the "Multisite mode" to
* Stationary, which will scan through all CCs on each pass, allowing you to listen to traffic on all the sites you can hear from your location.
* Roam, which will scan the first CC the scanner finds whose decoding percentage that meets or exceeds the "hi" threshold you set. It will monitor this CC on each pass until the decoding percentage falls below the "low" threshold setting, at which time it will look for another CC.
* Off, which will scan the first CC the scanner finds that it identifies as a CC, regardless of decoding percentage, and continues to monitor that CC on each pass until it can no longer decode that CC at all.
- Create a few TSYS objects, each containing the control channels for 2-3 nearby sites, forming a "regional" trunked system object. Set Multisite based on the dscriptions above.

All of these options have benefits and drawbacks. Some will use more memory in the scanner because of all the duplicated talkgroups you'll want. Others will cause the scanner to spend more time scanning control channels, preventing it from scanning any conventional channels you have programmed as often and probably missing traffic.

But if you create multiple TSYS objects that include the same control channels, as I suspect you have in the picture above, that's causing the scanner to repeatedly scan the same CC multiple times on each scan pass, which is quite inefficient. Most would agree that you would only want to scan a single CC once on each pass to save scan "time." I prefer the regional TSYS object approach and use the TSYS "lock out" feature to active those regional TSYS objects when needed.

For my PRO-197 I use 9 out of the 20 Bankis with the same frequency/tower setup. This allows me to select exactly what I want to monitor, Bank by Bank. For my PRO-106 It's almost the same except I break down SCHP by the 4 dispatchers. Your use of ATT is in question from your location to the pickiens tower. To the right of "BOOST" is the NOTES sector. You should open that up by dragging it to the right and entering the Bank # and name. Maybe if I E-mailed this to you would help. The data would be for my area, but, you could better understand it since mine works perfectly. Larry